One lone cat against a big bad world

You Just Entered The Friend Zone!

You are about to enter a dimension that no man should dare enter especially if he is trying to get into a relationship with a woman or more importantly get laid. This is the dreaded place that is known throughout both the online world as well as the real world as a place that says “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” And guys if this has happened to you, you should know by now that there is no escape… from the Friend Zone!

For starters I have been researching today’s dating culture in my spare time for the last few years and what I have learned awakened me primarily because I am no stranger to this phenomenon. I have been friend-zoned all throughout high school and junior high not to mention my twenties and this was back in a time before the term “friend zone” even existed. The last time this happened to me was four years ago and after that and after I started learning about the dating scene and how it is rigged against men, I swore to myself in the words of Sean Connery when asked if he would ever play James Bond again: “Never again.”

So what is the Friend Zone? Well, in the dating culture (or as I should really say “the hookup culture” because everything is all about sex these days), the Friend Zone is a woman’s first line of defense against men who they feel are below what they’re looking for in terms of looks and status. Unfortunately a majority of men in America fall under this category.

This tactic is more commonly used when a woman is in her teenage years right on up until her early-thirties when her status is highest and she is at the peak of her physical attractiveness where she usually seeks out nothing but the highest-quality man in terms of both looks and status. This is also the period where women focus on having as much “fun” as possible with the bad boys and rich men with options while at the same time giving the lower-quality man hope (or more likely a false sense of hope) that he will one day have a relationship with her but for now is merely there to offer moral support, a shoulder for her to cry on whenever something bad happens with her boyfriend/husband and to buy her things, such as drinks at the bar and that expensive necklace she wanted at the jewelry store that her boyfriend/husband will not buy her.

The Friend Zone tactic used by women is so effective that many men who wind up in a woman’s Friend Zone are either forced to settle for lower quality women, relocate to another country to look for foreign women to date and marry if they can afford to travel or they end up dropping out of the dating scene altogether to focus on building their careers and their wealth (remember a majority of American Women are attracted to money above all else no matter how much they try to deny it.)

Many times the majority of men are forced to wait until their mid to late thirties to get laid, assuming they get laid at all. Others just simply opt out of the dating scene altogether because they know the game is rigged against them and end up with some degree of hidden resentment toward women. And when it comes to these men’s attitude towards the dating game, they realize that the only way to win the dating game is not to play at all.

And I am aware that men do this to women that are not attractive to them but for the purposes of this article we are just focusing on when women do this to men since that is the most common form of the Friend Zone practice.

So what prompted me to do this piece on the Friend Zone? Well not too long ago, I found a status update on my Facebook feed from my local radio station 97.9 KISS-FM in Utica, New York which had to do with a woman who friend-zoned a guy and suddenly decided she had feelings for him just as she found out that he was about to get involved with another girl. The status went something like this: “Saw a tweet yesterday: ‘A guy in the friend zone almost got a girlfriend today so I told him I like him so he wouldn’t. I don’t… but I need him just in case. He’s my backup plan.’ This is from a girl in her late-twenties, too old to be playing these games. Have you ever had or do you have a backup plan? I just don’t get why people in this day and age continue to string people along.”

Yep. Sounds about right.

Here’s my spin on this: First up, if the girl actually straight up liked him, she would not have friend-zoned him in the first place so she could focus on hooking up with the bad boys. But sadly that is what society and the media teaches them to do. I think what happened here was a simple case of a guy seeing a girl he could have a relationship with therefore finding a way out of the other girl’s Friend Zone and the girl who imprisoned him in the Friend Zone could not handle the fact that the guy found someone he can possibly do better with so she decides to come between him and this other girl by making up that line about how she liked him so that he could not pursue the other girl.

In some ways, the Friend Zone concept harkens back to the review I did of the 80’s teen sex comedy The Last American Virgin earlier in the year. In that movie, Gary was trying to get with Karen but kept blowing his chances at every turn. Besides it was obvious that she would rather hook up with Gary’s bad boy best friend Rick thus putting Gary in the Friend Zone. And to further add to his torment, Karen attempted to pair Gary up with her geeky and weird-looking best friend who genuinely liked him. Even when it looked like Gary was finally going to end up with Karen after he helped her get an abortion after Rick knocked her up, the movie threw us a curve and Karen ended up taking the bad boy boyfriend back thereby forcing Gary back into the Friend Zone and he goes home crying, hence probably the most realistic ending in the history of movies. Plus I still stand by what I said in the review about how I believe that The Last American Virgin predicted today’s dating culture, even though the classic symbol of a man in the Friend Zone remains the character of Duckie from Pretty in Pink which I have not seen.

And I’m just going to say for the record I think that line “He’s my backup plan” is kind of disturbing.

Well to answer KISS-FM’s question, have I ever used a girl as a “backup plan?” No, I have not. In fact personally I have never had the chance to break a woman’s heart. However, I know of a girl on Facebook who attempted to get with me while she was still in a relationship with another guy, which I guess qualifies as her trying to make me her “backup plan.” I did not go through with that primarily because that girl was drama-central, not to mention she had kids. Then after her boyfriend cheated on her, she tried to get with me again. I refused and she ended up taking her ex back.

So in conclusion, what do I think about the concept of the Friend Zone? It’s real, folks and it’s not spectacular. Sorry. Seinfeld joke, couldn’t resist. I’m sure many of you guys are reading this article know what I’m talking about and I’m sure a lot of you have been there. I know I have and if I knew then what I know now, I probably would have saved myself a whole lot of grief in high school and everything else beyond that.

And this is coming from a guy who as The Who’s theme song from CSI: Miami says, “won’t get fooled again.”